The facts are painfully apparent. Though hundreds -- if not thousands -- of people in D.C. are professionally paid to pretend these facts require debate and analysis and parsing and speculation and press releases and pithy Tweets and Sunday Show roundtables and C-SPAN symposia and to-camera cable-TV rants and lengthy thousand-page books, they don't require any of that. The facts are simple. The facts are obvious. The facts are undeniable to anyone not paid fistfulls of sweaty money to lie or sensationalize:

1. The Democratic Party shit on its base with its policies, as noted above.

2. This demoralized the Democratic base, which responded by not turning out to vote. As CBS News notes, "Hispanics, African Americans, union members and young people were among the many core Democratic groups that turned out in large numbers in the 2008 elections (but) turnout among these groups dropped off substantially, even below their previous midterm levels."

3. In cause-and-effect style, the result of all this was, as the Washington Post reports, a freshman congressional class that is primarily made up of angry, white, lunatic-conservative assholes.

So yes, all of you who are wasting all of our time pretending this isn't the basic point-A-to-point-B story of the election -- and there are a lot of you out there -- please, if not for me, then for everyone else: Go fuck yourself.

And finally, New Rule, if you're going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you might as well go ahead and make it about something. With all due respect to my friends Jon and Stephen, it seems to me that if you truly wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you'd side with the sane and the reasonable, and not try to pretend that the insanity is equally distributed in both parties.

Keith Olbermann is right, when he says he's not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts, the other one is very close to playing with his poop.

Now, getting over 200,000 people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement, and gave me hope. And what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the Mall in August! Although it weighed the same.

BruinKid makes some good points too;

We all get things wrong sometimes. I don't agree with Jon or Stephen or Bill or anyone else 100% of the time. And we shouldn't. If we did, we're nothing more than sycophants or robots, dutifully repeating what we're told.

Taibbi's attitude towards the political landscape of America in the Third Millenium is, in some ways, similar to Thomas Frank's, that there's a bait and switch being pulled, that the real action is not the social issues - it never is - but rather the money. The looting of America by the Biggest, Ballsiest Crooks Ever is the only genuinely important story. For Taibbi, the teabaggers' racism, sexism, xenophobia, libertarianism, and other extremisms seem to serve much the same function as geologists see for trees and grass: sure, it's striking sometimes, but ultimately, it's merely hair that covers the bald truth about the world. I'm not sure I entirely agree - but damn, when you read Matt describe what's really been going on, without any sugar coating or euphemisms, and with that throat-slittingly sharp style... damn if Taibbi doesn't have a point:

It's always been about the money. And power. Progressive ideals will always lose to those willing to do anything to achieve money and power until we realize that kumbaya is sometimes best delivered as a tattoo on our knuckles.

Don't try to get along with bullies. Convince 'em to get along with you. People sometimes act better after you deck 'em. If they don't, deck 'em again until they do. Ganging up on big bullies is plenty OK.

"Darrell Issa will issue subpoenas nonstop like some sort of deranged FOX News reality show. Peak wingnut may very well arrive in the next two years, if only because Issa is like a caricature of Dan Burton drawn by Timothy McVeigh." -Tim F, Link

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Obama begins two hundred million trillion dollar Asian vacation

Barack Obama is fleeing the country for a ten-day "please stop taking our jobs?" tour of India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan. And there have been many accurate news reports suggesting that Obama is spending two hundred million dollars a day on this Gluttonous Asian Vacation: Our president does not pack lightly! According to Matt Drudge, the White House has been lifted from its foundation and placed on a flatbed truck made entirely out of diamonds, and this diamond-encrusted flatbed truck was placed on the most expensive aircraft carrier — and then this aircraft carrier was put in the cargo hold of a different and way more expensive aircraft carrier. And this aircraft carrier is just one of the thirty-four warships that Obama is taking with him. (The rest of these ships are carrying delicious snacks, like popcorn shrimp.) Talk about splurging! Michele Bachmann is just so goddamned angry about this reckless spending, and her soon-to-be formed Constitutional Conservative Caucus Party (CCCP — what a filthy Pinko!) is going to hold hearings, on Fox News. Too bad all of this is just phony baloney nonsense made up by some Indian tabloid. Uh, but it is true that Obama will attend the G-20 and APEC summits while he's over there. Shame on him! (What?) [CNN]

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More gay voters chose the marriage-is-between-a-man-and-a-woman party in the midterm elections than previously, according to a CNN poll.

Thirty-one percent of self-identified gay voters cast their ballots for Republicans on Tuesday, 4 percentage points more than in 2008.

Per usual, Rachel Maddow destroys conservative lies. It bothers me just a bit that while all these reasons why the Democrats got swamped in the mid terms are floating around, very few are calling attention to the right-wing echo chamber which ratcheted up the lies against Obama and the Democrats, thereby scaring Americans and exploiting covert prejudices against Obama...

And don't even get me started on Fox News. The fact that for the first time in history, a political party has an entire "news" network - the number one news network at that - in its back pocket and pushing its agenda seems to escape everyone. This is a shame because it's significant. And ironic. The clarion call against Obama seems to be that he is a dictator and runs a regime.

Who's more of a product of a "regime?" President Obama or a network fueling a political party?

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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

(and a loss of someone's head) .......

US Troops beheaded Iraqi detainee Said they had orders from "higher ups"LinkThat's what we needed - something to cheer us up...

Some Republican lawmakers — still reveling in Tuesday's statewide election sweep — are proposing an unprecedented solution to the state's estimated $25 billion budget shortfall: dropping out of the federal Medicaid program.

Why do I get the feeling that Austin is going to be the 21st Century version of Berlin. We'll be airlifting Medicaid, Social Security checks, books, and normal-sized belt buckles into that city within the decade.

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Job growth over the last 12 months:

Government takeover! Run away! Look at all those government jobs --- wait. Uh.

Reminder: Americans, specifically self-identified independents and conservatives, voted against the policies that created over a million private sector jobs and the policies that shrunk the number of government jobs.

Adding... American voters also rejected the people responsible for this:

Middle-income Americans are now paying federal taxes at or near historically low levels, according to the latest available data. That's true whether it comes to their federal income taxes or their total federal taxes.

Michele Bachmann wants to be in the House leadership! She'd be the only Republican woman at the top of the heap, but I think even-keeled Americans of both parties and genders can have sympathy for John Boehner's desperate signals that he'd rather not.

[...]

Many women are horrified by people like Bachmann because they fear that when the rest of the country watches her bizarre performances, they see not just an addled person from Minnesota, but a woman in politics. We have to get past that. Men don't cringe on behalf of their sex when Newt Gingrich goes Islamophobic, or Carl Paladino threatens to take out a reporter. There are many battles yet to be fought, but I think women have achieved enough success in this country to stop feeling as if Bachmann reflects on anyone but her party and herself.

Palin, meanwhile, was engrossed in her own postelection minicrisis when she "favorited" an Ann Coulter Twitter message praising a church sign that referred to President Obama as a "Taliban Muslim." Coulter would be another one of the women we are not taking responsibility for.

No woman I have ever met or spoken to has ever felt horrified at the fact that Bachmann and Palin are female. Why should they? What they have felt is pure disgust for these two inept, ridiculous clowns who just happen to be women.